CSotD: If you’re so smart, why are you home?
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Today's Gil will probably ring truer with those of us who work from home, as opposed to that cute girl from New Hampshire who works at home and is seen in ads in the margins of all the articles I read on-line.
She makes so much money that I'm sure she has hired someone to watch daytime television for her.
For the rest of us, there are times you are hunkered down and then there are times you are either doing some work task that is fairly mindless or perhaps the dishes, or — since you spread your work over a seven day week rather than a Monday-Friday schedule — you might happen to take a break at two o'clock on a Thursday afternoon.
And then you can have the TV on without guilt, until you see what is on TV at two o'clock on a Thursday afternoon, and then you feel guilty.
To be fair, I don't think it's all that far-fetched for advertisers to suspect that the people watching these shows are idiots. Or, at least, desperate enough and intellectually lazy enough to watch "Pretty in Pink" because they've already seen it so many times that missing the first half hour isn't going to matter.
Remember that scene in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" where a blustering sheriff (Kenneth Mars) is imploring a crowd to form a posse and pursue Butch and Sundance? He's getting nowhere, and, finally, a huckster steps up on the stage beside him and starts selling bicycles, explaining that he hated to see a good crowd go to waste.
Or, for that matter, consider the crowds that gathered for executions during French Revolution, and what sorts of things the hucksters might have sold once they had assembled that gormless collection of lowlifes?
In Marat/Sade, Charlotte Corday raises the same issue that troubles Gil:
What kind of town is this? What sort of streets are these? Who invented this? Who profits by it? I saw peddlers at every corner. They're selling little guillotines with tiny sharp blades and dolls filled with red liquid which spurts from the neck when the sentence is carried out.What kind of children are these who can play with this toy so efficiently? And who is judging? Who is judging?
Gil may not have thought it out to that level, but he's only a kid.
Still, he's a kid in a world in which people are regularly sold out to the scam artists who would steal their structured settlements, who would sign them up for courses they'll never complete in order to harvest their Pell Grant and Veterans benefits, who will happily let them rent-to-own a TV for only four or five times its retail value despite the fact that their credit record shows them to be utterly incapable of making wise decisions about money.
Despite? Despite? No!
Because!
True story: My first sale as a purveyor of the Kirby Classic was to a woman whose house was so loaded with trinkets and junk that I had to move a camel saddle to demonstrate the thing. I was delighted to have made the sale until the next morning when I called it in to the credit agency.
This was in the Denver metro area, which even in 1972 was pretty populous, but, as soon as I said her name, the guy at the agency started laughing and said, "No way!"
But we had a second lender who would cover anybody, so I called him. Same thing — he didn't even need to look her up. And even this bloodsucking parasite knew he wasn't interested.
So I had to go get the vacuum cleaner back from her and she didn't seem a bit surprised.
Today, we'd likely finance her and hope she'd make enough payments to cover the cost, and then we'd see how long she'd keep giving us money until we had to go get the vacuum cleaner back and sell it as refurbished.
And, given the interest rate we'd charge her — with no credit check! — we'd make our profit from her soon enough.
If not, we'd make it up through the poor suckers who actually made those usurious payments. You know, the schmucks dumb enough to sign the contract and honest enough to honor it.
As Charlotte Corday asks, who is judging this?
Evidently not the same ones who, in 1968, told Campbell's to stop putting marbles in the bottom of the soup bowls in their ads in order to make the vegetables stick up out of the broth as if they were a larger proportion of the product.
Or maybe it is the same folks after all.
In any case, Gil, you were born too late.
A generation ago, you'd have been seeing nice little ads aimed at nice little stay-at-home parents who would then go out and buy Campbell's Soup, or Calgon, with its ancient Chinese secret, or Brawny paper towels.
Today, it's generally assumed that we're all running as fast as we can just to stay in one place and that anyone who is not in the race is disabled, uneducated, or just plain too stupid to be of value in the workplace.
Or maybe they just figure anyone who is home and has half a brain is streaming something from Netflix or otherwise using that hemisphere for something that won't shrink it any further.
It used to be that the Dialing for Dollars movie was almost always the best choice among four weak ones. Today, thanks to the explosion of choices offered by cable television, an old movie, even a mediocre old movie that you've seen 18 times, is the best choice among 150 weak ones.
Lucky boy you are, Gil, to be the beneficiary of so much progress!
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